Michael Phelps doesn't have it as good

We're off to Canada for a month so this will probably be my last post for a while -- unless I get inspired by all of the tuques, snow and starbucks -- oh and the impending consititutional meltdown -- who knew Canadian politics could be so interesting?!

Anyhoots, I wanted to end my 2008 run of Belgian posts on a high note and talk about one of my very favourite things about living here -- swimming.

It is good that I love swimming here so much, because one of my other very favourite things about the Belgians is how they make hot chocolate, and so the two (almost) cancel each other out.

At any rate, I love swimming here, mostly because I go to the NATO pool. A few times a week I drive Andrew to work (through insane Brussellois traffic, which includes the dreaded rond point Meiser, which has 7 major roads feeding into it, four lanes, two different sets of tram tracks, a whole passel of aggressive Belgian drivers and a traffic light system that was constructed on a "live and let die" philosophy).

It is all worth it, however, to get to the NATO pool. By 8:30 when we pull up to the Staff Centre all of the NATO-ites are getting out of the pool, which means that very often I have the entire place to myself. This is a deep and abiding joy that only a fellow swimmer can understand. I imagine that it's akin to a holding your new born baby for the first time or winning BOTH show case prizes on The Price is Right.

So yes, swimming at NATO is gloriously glorious. I even loved swimming for that three week period when legionnaire's disease was detected in the showers and they were closed. At that point I had to shuffle out of the pool, with chlorine-filled hair, red racoon eyes from my goggles and a towel wrapped around me and walk through the staff centre (where Condoleeza Rice can pop up at any second) to go to the showers in the gym area. Even that humiliation (and let's face it, potential international incident) did not quell my love of the pool.

Swimming as often as I do has allowed me to detect some particularly Belgian elements to the whole experience. For instance, the life guards do not seem at all concerned about, you know, guarding my life. Generally, and this is not an exageration, they sit in their glass booth reading the newspaper or looking at their laptop. This would probably be fine (although such behaviour was definitely not condoned in my Bronze Cross training, which I took at age 13) except for the fact that they've recently built a sauna almost directly in front of the lifeguard booth. So the lifegaurds, when they are in their little office, cannot actually see the pool. Now, call me rule-bound or old fashioned, but I had thought that one of the essential duties -- one might even say the ONLY duty-- of life guarding is to watch the water.

In theory the sauna should be a very exciting and wonderful addition to the whole pool experience, but I only ventured in once. I found myself in very close quarters with a large-tummied, small-speedo'd Croat whose excessive body hair seemed to make him sweat inhumanly. I didn't stay long, because the whole experience reminded me of the Ritz Gym incident, which I can't figure out how to link to, but is way back in a December 2006 post.

Anyway, the other reason I love the NATO pool is that towards the end of my swim, it gets invaded by local Belgian school children who do their gym class in the water. I love seeing all of these 7 year olds pour in, because it reminds me of when I used to swim on the Cowansville Swim Team (one of our team chants was C. O. W. Mooooooo! Cowansville!, when you're a 12 year old girl, mooing like a cow while in swimsuit isn't that great for the self-esteem). Anyway, seeing all of the little kids chattering and lauging as they leap into the pool warms my heart.

What makes me laugh, however, is once again how totally indifferent Belgians seem to be to basic rules of safety. Growing up we had a big old inground pool and given that we there was five Tector children and we were kind of maniacs, there were a few "incidents." For instance, my little sister cracked her head open while attempting a back dive and my older sister Susie fell into the deep well that housed the pool pump. To be fair, my parents had placed (rotten) boards over the hole and Susie didn't actually fall to the bottom of the well because she was able to grip onto the splinters of unbroken wood until help arrived. La la.

Anyway, my point is that though we had our share of unsupervised mayhem, there was one rule that could not be broken: No running around the pool. Now, you figure if my preoccupied and overwhelmed parents chose to enforce that rule above all of the other ones we ignored or dismissed, you had to figure that running around the pool was a bad idea.

That's why I got a giggle today when the school children were late arriving . Their teachers were in a hurray, so they yelled at them to "Run, run and jump into the pool!" Which the kids promptly did, racing around the pool deck, leaping onto each other in a frenzy of near-drowning and potential-leg-breaking.

The lifeguards didn't even peer up from their newspapers.